Cry aloud? Hold nothing back? Raise your voice like shofar, proclaim to my people their crimes…

Day after day they claim to seek me

and fancy themselves to know my ways...

They ask, “Why have we fasted 

If you do not see;

Why have we denied ourselves if you pay no heed?”

Because on the day of your fast

you are preoccupied with your possessions

and oppress your workers!

Because you fast amidst contention and strife, and strike vicious blows. …

Is not this the fast that I desire:

To open the bands of wickedness,

To unfetter the bonds of the yoke;

To let the oppressed go free,

And whatever the yoke, to break it!

When we read Isaiah’s condemnation of greed and oppression, it would be easy to exclude ourselves from the perpetrators he names. After all, most of us don’t own factories or run businesses, and if we did, we know we wouldn’t oppress the workers!. But Isaiah is speaking to us.

Last Thanksgiving, I found myself spending several days in search of a turkey. It was very frustrating to have to spend so much time worrying about something so mundane. I must have checked 8 or 9 different places, from the Butcherie in Brookline to Trader Joes to get my usual Thanksgiving turkey. All I wanted was a kosher turkey. A kosher turkey that was not from Rubashkin.

Rubashkin’s is one of the labels on meat and poultry that comes from Agriprocessors, the largest producer of kosher meat in the country. Agriprocessors has become the greatest shande in the history of kosher food, having violated so many laws and crossed so many ethical boundaries it is hard to believe anyone who knows would be willing to purchase their meat today.

Agriprocessors first came to light with the publication of the book Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, by Stephen Bloom. The Jewish author described the tensions that arose in a small town in northern Iowa when the Rubashkin family took over a failed slaughterhouse in 1987 to open a state-of–the art glatt kosher meatpacking plant. He tells us that the family of Lubavitch Hasidim had an uneven relationship with the rural townspeople, some of whom derived economic benefit from the newcomers, while others’ lives were disrupted by the cultural dissonance.

Glatt kosher, by the way, does not mean ultra-kosher as some think. Glatt is a very specific technique of slaughtering that certain ultra-orthodox Jews insist on, but is not universally required or desirable. The meat from this glatt kosher slaughterhouse is prized by a particular Orthodox Jewish community. But Agriprocessors is no small company; it has become the largest purveyor of kosher meat in America.

The crimes that have been documented over the past two years include:

• Unsanitary conditions
• food safety issues
• Wastewater pollution problems
• Workers paid below minimum wage—the lowest in the industry
• Workers prevented from forming a union
• Failure to provide safety training for workers  or to protect workers from dangerous chemicals

A raid on the plant in May of this year detained 390 employees, mostly Guatemalans without legal status. In the aftermath of the raid, families were separated, with many workers sent out of state, and no financial support for the spouses and children. Instead of punishing the owners for knowingly hiring undocumented immigrants, the workers were shackled and charged with the felony of “identity theft” that led to five months in jail followed by immediate deportation.

When the imprisoned workers were interviewed by immigration lawyers over the summer, their plight and the exploitation they had experienced became national news. They told stories of twelve hour shifts, six-day work weeks, slave-like conditions. Teenagers as young as thirteen were working with sharp knives and dangerous machinery. Finally, last month, the Rubashkin owners and managers were indicted, with over 9000 counts of child labor law violations.

Ever since Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, was published a century ago, the woeful and unhealthy conditions in the country’s meat-packing plants have been widely known. In that era, the USDA created the Federal Meat Inspection Act to monitor conditions and to prosecute factories for non-compliance.

But in the past few decades, the slaughterhouses dispersed from urban centers to rural areas where they are much harder to keep track of and more difficult to unionize. The book Fast Food Nation documented the resurgence of unsafe and unsanitary conditions, as well as the widespread use of immigrant labor. The raid on Agriprocessors was not a unique event. Outside the kosher meat industry, an even larger raid on a slaughterhouse in Mississippi followed this summer. And recently, Somali immigrants who have replaced the undocumented workers in the meatpacking industry, have voiced their protest when their employers reneged on a agreement to allow them to pray during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Many of those workers lost their jobs when they stopped for evening prayers.

Fortunately, workers are not alone in their protests. Like the response to The Jungle a century ago, major Jewish religious organizations have raised objections too. It began with the Jewish Forward’s investigation of complaints from workers two years ago. Since that time, there has been a vocal and powerful effort to combine respect for kashrut and concern for ethical principles. 

The Conservative movement should be lauded for leading the charge. In particular, Rabbi Morris Allen, a Conservative rabbi in Minnesota, has visited the plant, led rallies and written and spoken widely about the abuses of Agriprocessors. His major contribution is the creation of the Hekhsher Tzedek, the justice certification, a label that will soon be given to kosher producers who meet a set of ethical criteria in five areas, including

• employees’ wages and benefits
• employee health and safety
• product development
• corporate transparency
• and environmental impact. 

Hekhsher Tzedek has received overwhelming support from all arms of the Conservative movement, by the Reform and Reconstructionist movements, as well as many major Jewish organizations. And just this week, the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest Orthodox authority and the rabbis behind the Orthodox Union kashrut certification, have also decided to create their own ethical business standards to apply to the kosher meat industry. Out of the ethical swamp surrounding Agriprocessors, Jews are becoming conscious of the corruption and refusing to stand idly by.

Some in the Jewish world continue to defend Agriprocessors, urging us to assume innocence until the evidence is in. The family is known within their community for community service as well. And the raid on the plant has kept Rubashkin meat and poultry off the shelves. Yet for many of us, the evidence against the company is clear enough.

So when I went looking for a kosher turkey, I was tempted to give up altogether and buy a nice organic, free-range turkey from Whole Foods.  I was so angry I considered abandoning kosher meat entirely. But that wouldn’t resolve the issues for the workers at Agriprocessors. Instead,

I want to support the kosher companies that provide good, safe jobs for their workers.

For example, the workers at Empire Chickens are unionized. Empire was recently honored by the Jewish Labor Committee for the positive relationships there between labor and management. Empire now has a line of organic poultry as well. Hebrew National, which—like Rubashkin’s--produces processed meats, is also a union plant. (Apparently they do answer to a higher authority.) Among the 15 largest kosher meat companies, seven are unionized, according to the The Forward. These are ethical businesses we should turn to for our holiday chicken.

Rabbi Morris Allen keeps kosher, but he does not eat meat. Yet his crusade on behalf of workers and consumers teaches us all a lesson. Whether you do or do not keep kosher, or whether you eat meat or not, this issue affects us all.

As Jews, it is a holy obligation to protest the crimes of Agriprocessors. It is a sacred duty to make sure that our food is ethically kosher as well as ritually kosher. In our own synagogue, we spent over two years discussing the importance of kashrut for our community, and developed guidelines for a thoughtful practice here at HBT. We discovered in that process that kashrut is more than following dietary rules. Among the values we used to determine what kosher means in our synagogue, we stated that

• Kashrut is a tool of Jewish identity and connects us to other Jews
• Kashrut is a connection to past and future generations
• Kashrut is a spiritual practice that brings holiness to our meals
• The practice of kashrut should include taking care of the environment and minimizing waste.

Today, I would urge us to add that the observance of kashrut should also take into account being aware of the plight of the workers who provide our food.

Kashrut is also a practice that identifies us as Jewish. For the rural people of Iowa, the immigrant workers in the meat-packing plants, and the average American reading the newspaper reports, Agriprocessors represents Judaism. For the animal-rights activists and the union organizers, and the environmentalists, Agriprocessors represents us.

We should look on the Hekhsher Tzedek as a major advance in Jewish law, a historic innovation of the American Jewish community, a means to hold the food industry accountable and a true representation of our noblest Jewish values.

These issues should prod each of us to think about where our food comes from and how it is produced. Perhaps if we did, we might not end today’s fast so quickly. Whenever we meet with a caterer, or shop in the supermarket, or eat out at a kosher restaurant, every Jew should be asking the owner, “Where does your meat come from?”

There was a time when we knew the farmer who grew our food. If we didn’t know the farmer, then we knew the butcher and the grocer personally. We could depend on them for safe and delicious food, at reasonable prices. We knew the workers too, because they were our neighbors.

In today’s world, everyone is learning to keep kosher. We are all becoming more aware of what we eat, and more selective about the food we serve on our tables, put in our mouths, and feed to our children. What we eat is influenced by what is healthy, what gives us pleasure, what nourishes us. It’s also influenced by where it’s grown, how it’s cultivated and fertilized, how far it has to travel to get to our table. We are more aware of how food is marketed to us and to our children, and how pervasive the marketing is, not only through advertising, but direct marketing in movies and television shows, and through the placement of products on grocery shelves and the prevalence of certain products in controlled environments like schools and offices. We should also be concerned about who is growing and who is harvesting our food, how it is produced and packaged, how healthy and safe the conditions are for the workers.

Food is an industry and is produced much farther from our experience. And so an ethical consciousness of our food is more urgent than ever

If the rest of the world is becoming more mindful of all these issues, the Jewish community has an even greater responsibility for the industry that represents us to the outside world, the industry that provides food to the Jewish community, the kosher food industry. Each of us is responsible, not only for our own food safety, but for the plight of the workers who bring us the food on our plates.

A Hasid once came to his rebbe and asked him why the stork is called hasidah in Hebrew. After all, hasidah, like Hasid, means devout.

The rebbe replied, “Because it often feeds its brood and worries about it with great devotion.”

“Then why,” continued the student, “is the stork not kosher?”

The answer: “Because it worries solely about its own!”

On this fast day, may we devote ourselves to brooding and worrying about those who provide our food. May we hear the cry of Isaiah, to

open the bands of wickedness,

unfetter the bonds of the yoke;

and let the oppressed go free,

Rabbi Barbara Penzner